I had plans this week. To finish my VAT return early, tie up all my loose ends and publish a stellar post on Pink Tape to see out 2025 with. But I was waylaid. Partly by some lurgis, which I have finally vanquished, and partly due to a troublesome phone download. So instead you get this dross.

Digital data…phone downloads to be precise. Every member of the family bar has been there. Fear of your search filters filtering out the nugget of important information means that it sometimes feels easier to just ask for all data from a device within a specified time period. Except. If the person who owns that phone is under the age of 40 the likelihood is that what will be produced is a haystack of mountainous proportions, liberally sprinkled with things they don’t want other people to see and which, frankly, we don’t much want to look at either. And things which need urgent weeding or redacting. And when that happens some poor sod (usually counsel) is going to have to sift through it. After court, after bedtime, hour after hour, ticking off this chat and that subfolder, producing schedules of what is there and what isn’t. And what needs to be manually removed. Because its privileged. Or confidential. Or intimate and utterly irrelevant. It’s like a sort of weird immersion torture, sitting for hours with your stinging eyes glued to the screen, images and words describing the momentous moments, the mundane and the minutiae of someone else’s life, all flicking across your screen in a continuous blur until all sense of self and time is lost.

Quite apart from a growing worry that the wholesale downloading of phones may be a disproportionate invasion of privacy, doing things this way is also a significant burden on the lawyers. Because the judge sure isn’t going to read tens of thousands of entries or view tens of thousands of images. No, the judge is going to read the schedule counsel have prepared, or the small bundle of documents the lawyers have identified as relevant, or marked for redaction. And the work that goes on to get the thing trial ready will have been substantial and unseen. And if you are paid through legal aid (as usually 3 of four lawyers in each case are) it is also completely unpaid. Gratis. Free. Hours and hours and hours of it. Every hour spent on phone downloads is an hour you can’t spend earning. And an hour you can’t spend with your kids. And of course, it’s also done under immense time pressure. Because nobody wants to be the one who causes the trial timetable to fall over.

I felt a tiny pang of sympathy for the people responsible for publishing the Epstein files this weekend, seeing that they were being criticised for redacting the pictures, and then criticised for removal of a small number of images after publication (some of which now appear to be back, but more robustly redacted). The concern was that the pictures removed were done for sinister reasons. Who knows – I offer no view on the specifics. But it will be no surprise to family lawyers (whatever their views of the Trump government) to find that a vast body of disclosure requires redaction, or that a small number of errors will creep through, particularly when the job of redaction is done under time pressure. Just as we work to protect the privacy, identity and addresses of the vulnerable when working with phone downloads, there will have been similar work going on over the pond. And then I thought: there are probably a massive team of them and they were probably being paid, and I didn’t feel quite so sympathetic.

But that theme, that we are all desperately doggy paddling across great unmanageable oceans of too much information, lurching from one swell to the next, with our puny bodies ill equipped to keep us afloat atop the sheer volume of digital data, that theme isn’t going away. We need water to survive, but sometimes it feels as if we are all at risk of being overwhelmed by a tsunami of information, and that although there is information everywhere there is ‘not a drop to drink’, polluted as it is by fake news, AI slop or other people’s lies and dirty laundry. (I’ve re-read those last three sentences and they are so crackingly bad I’m going to leave them in, just for your entertainment. When I lose control of my own metaphors that’s a strong indicator that it’s time for a holiday – is that a meta-metaphor? An uber-metaphor?).

Anyway, I’m now officially on leave. During that time I will not be looking at the contents of other people’s phones, and will be trying to cleanse my soul of the more difficult things I have read and heard this working year. In fact I hope I won’t even be spending much time looking at my own phone and will be concentrating on the minutiae of my own family life, which I don’t do enough of.

See you in 2026.